….Maybe not a revolution, but they need to end the ‘business as usual era’. In recent times, some movie industry players have continued to work hard in bringing the movie up to a very good standard; yet, the clamour for more efforts to be made in order to improve the industry rages on as there have been complaints from various quarters on the kind of movies that are being churned out to the public.
It seems anyone with a camera and a camera man these days can produce a movie for public ‘consumption’. The quality of some movies produced of late has decreased as the thrills, intrigues and suspense are far from what they used to be. The inspiration one would have gotten from some of these movies is fast fading just as the titles are no longer interesting and needs to be considered.
Looking back, some of the Ghanaian classic movies from yester years even when there were no hi-tech sophisticated cameras to really show the effects, proved from the script that the writers had something upstairs, and not just wanting to make productions for sale…
No matter how a script (bad or good storyline) looks like, if the production is crap, then the central message that would accompany the picture would have been defeated. A movie that has to do with graphics, even if the funding is little could be of standard depending on the intellect of the producer.
The latest trend is where the same movie is given different titles to scam the consumer. A movie like ‘Familiar strangers’ and ‘For Better For War’ among others are just examples of movies unsuspecting people bought only to realise that they are the same storylines with the same cast. If you’ll scam, better scam diplomatically and in style.
Local Genre Movies (Kumawood)
The local movie industry is the most untapped gold mine in the movie industry. They churn out large quantity of movies than their English counterparts but unfortunately, they produce the movie with the ‘local consumer’ in mind. If a Ghanaian in some parts of the country cannot make head and tail of what is going on, how can a non-Ghanaian grasp the message they’re sending out in the movie? If the producers tap into all the gold there, the industry will see massive improvement.
Majority of the movies have very good storylines (apart from the trade of insults/offensive language and the ‘fly by night’ type of storylines) but with very bad or extremely poor production. The industry needs improvement because it is depreciating in standard as much as they are well patronised. Subtitling is either done haphazardly or not at all.
If our local movies producers put more effort in what they’re doing, they can present their movies to international markets and be considered for film festivals and awards (that is if the jury can get some subtitle to know what he/she is watching). Most of the African films that win awards are not in the English language, they’re in the local dialects but grab awards. The producers should be ‘more’ business minded look at the bigger market.
The year is almost coming to an end….really, how many movies have been produced in the year to hold an annual Ghana Movie Awards, if there will be any? We now have an industry person as a Deputy Minister in this department, but so far—-nothing….We don’t even know much what happened to the ‘little’ money the industry was bequeathed with in the budget….
I know the industry is experiencing piracy issues – but world production houses face the same problem but still, they produce good quality movies.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Those responsible for our industry should scrutinise movies before they get into the market because standard is what will make the international community give the movie industry the accolades it deserves.
source..GC
Comments
Post a Comment